Fidelity and infidelity to Judaism among the Jews of Spain

Before any reflection on the fidelity or infidelity of the Jews of Spain, one must keep in mind, as Luis Fernández Suárez has rightly written, that Christian society never recognized in the Jews “anything but a provisional right to existence, this period of transition being meant to end with the conversion and integration of the old Israel into the new.”¹ The reasons for conversion are varied: social pressure, exactions of greater or lesser violence, pogroms, and finally exile.

The Church’s identifying constraints were never uniform but were continuous until 1492. Politics and history were intertwined, as the invasion of Spain by the Moors in 711 bears witness — an invasion that brought a definite respite, at first, to the Jews. In the worst moments, the latter would recover hope and quietude and managed to keep their faith openly. Thus, in 695, when the situation was desperate on account of the decisions of the Council of Toledo,² the conquest of the greater part of Spain saved them. This discontinuity in the oppression made them forget the precarious character of their settlement in Spain, to the point that they considered this country a second Israel. Conversions of convenience, however — betraying the injunctions of the halakha concerning the sanctification of the Name³ — appeared rapidly, though one cannot know whether all of them were insincere.⁴

The questions raised by this problematic can have no definitive answer. We can at most present facts and analyses in their historical sequence. For no one can sound the reins and the hearts and know whether all the new Christians were faithful to their faith or to the practices of their ancestral religion.

The sermons, of a rare violence, of a priest of Écija, Ferrán Martínez, had as their consequence the terrible massacres of 1391, which decimated thousands of Jews and made entire communities disappear. Following these exactions and these murders, Vicente Ferrer distinguished himself by mass conversions. During his apostolate, which lasted until his death in 1419, it is estimated that he converted 35,000 terrorized Jews. This situation brought about an exile of the Jews toward the Maghreb and, above all, the appearance in very great numbers of new Christians who had to swallow the host with a knife at their throat. Here again, one cannot distinguish the Jews who chose the mask while awaiting better times from those who wished to be done, definitively, with discrimination, persecution and fear.

Between 1391 and 1492 — the date of the promulgation of the decree of exile — a new fact appeared in Spain. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, baptismal water was sufficient to efface the Jewish taint, but in 1449 the influx of converts — also called conversos or new Christians — who could henceforth have access to all the dignities and to the religious orders, posed a genuine social problem for the Christians.

During riots in Toledo, the sentencia estatuto was proclaimed in 1449, the first racial measure, the first statute of purity of blood⁵ that would spread throughout Spain a century later, when the statutes would be adopted by Philip II and blessed by the pope.⁶ This practice was to gangrene Spanish social life and to affect thousands of new Christians. Until 1492, however, the Jews were able, under difficult conditions, to practice their religion; but from the decree of expulsion on, all those who remained in what was becoming the “land of idolatry” were guilty in the eyes of Judaism. Maimonides, in his Epistle on Persecution, had softened the rigor of the halachic imperative on the sanctification of the Name, but left no place for permanent infidelity. What he says of Muhammad applies, evidently, to Christianity:

“Whoever lets himself be killed rather than acknowledge the prophetic mission of this man [Muhammad], it will be said of him that he has done what is right and good, that he will receive a great reward and attain a superior dignity, for he sacrificed himself for the sanctification of the Name… But to him who comes to question us, to know whether he should let himself be killed or acknowledge [the prophetic mission of Muhammad], we answer: let him acknowledge [Muhammad] and not let himself be killed, but let him not remain in the kingdom of this king… The counsel I give to myself, and the advice I wish to give — to myself, to my friends, and to those who ask me for counsel — is that one must leave these places and go to a place where one can practice one’s religion without constraint or fear; let one abandon one’s house, one’s sons⁷ and all that one possesses, for the religion that God has bequeathed to us has an immense value, and its obligations come before all the contingencies that are contemptible in the eyes of enlightened persons.”⁸

From then on, a nagging question arises, a question we shall encounter further on: could all the insincere new Christians who secretly practiced the religion of Moses — the crypto-Jews — leave? Did all of them have the means of their fidelity?

The edict of expulsion was prepared with the restoration of the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella. As early as 1476, the “final solution” took shape and the idea of an exile took on more and more substance. The new Christians henceforth fell under inquisitorial surveillance. Those who left — some 120,000 people — but above all those who arrived in places where they could profess Judaism openly, were able, without a doubt, to give the finest example of fidelity⁹: “The departure had the appearance of a great religious movement, as if the exiles were animated by the hope of soon receiving the miraculous aid of God.” Bernáldez, a historian contemporary with the event, writes: “They left the land of their birth, small and great, old men and children, on foot or on donkeys and other mounts, in carts, and each made his way toward the port to which he was bound, and they walked along the roads and through the fields in very harsh and perilous conditions, some falling, others rising again, some dying, some being born, some falling ill, so that there was no Christian who did not feel pity for them, and wherever they went they were invited to be baptized, and some converted because of the situation and remained, but very few…”¹⁰ We are here confronted with the most concrete case of the choice between absolute fidelity, with all the risks it entails, and the infidelity due to discouragement, fatigue and illness. Such is the description of the Christian chronicler. Let us now hear that of Joseph Ha-Cohen: “All the hosts of the Lord, the exiles of Jerusalem in Spain, left that accursed land in the 5th month of the year 5252, that is, in 1492, and from there scattered to the four corners of the earth. From the port of Cartagena there set out, on the 16th of the month of Av (3 August), sixteen great ships laden with human cattle, and it was the same in the other provinces. The Jews went wherever the wind drove them — to Africa, to Asia, to Greece and to Turkey, countries they still inhabit to this day… These unfortunate creatures died of despair along their way: the Muslims disemboweled some to extract from their entrails the gold they had swallowed to hide it… Many remained in Spain who had not had the strength to leave, or whose hearts God had not touched.”¹¹ Joseph Ha-Cohen does not forget the emigration toward Portugal, where the Jews, deceived by a greedy king, knew massacres and forced conversions, and found themselves in the situation of the new Christians of Spain, watched over by an Inquisition still more ferocious.

Here, once again, the same question arises, a question without answer for those who remained — some desirous of preserving their social position, others broken by exhaustion: from 1492 on, if they wished to remain “Jews,” they had to don the garb of Christianity, give marks of fidelity to their new religion, and, thus masked, try to keep, as far as possible, their ancestral faith. The hunt for the conversos — who always remained Jews in the eyes of the old Christians — very quickly became a national sport, practiced not only by the Inquisition but by the entire population, which sought to flush out the slightest sign of Judaism. A change of linen, or the act of laying a clean tablecloth and lighting candles on Friday evening, rest on Saturday, the non-consumption of pork, the washing of meat, the throwing of a bit of bread dough into the fire, a particular sartorial care on a day other than Sunday, were the signs easiest to perceive.¹² The priests recalled the dates of the most important Jewish feasts and urged people to be particularly vigilant at these times of year and to denounce.

The ravages caused by the informers struck not only the person denounced but the entirety of his family, which found itself deprived of all support by the confiscation of its goods, and dishonored forever in the eyes of the old Christians.¹³ This double life, at once heretical and heroic — for the penalties of the Inquisition ranged from imprisonment of greater or lesser length to the stake — was nonetheless insufficient in the eyes of the Law and of Maimonides’s counsel. A few understood this; others, drawn by profit, began to leave the Iberian peninsula toward the end of the sixteenth century in order to found what would come to be called the Jerusalem of the North, the community of Amsterdam, whose commercial brilliance and the liberty that reigned there already dazzled all of Europe.

The first families cut off from their religion sought, with a moving fidelity, to recover the Law of Moses, and from the first years of the seventeenth century the world metropolis of money and of liberty¹⁴ attracted crypto-Jews for commercial and religious reasons. Those who did not leave for Amsterdam and remained in the Iberian peninsula did so as well, but at the peril of their lives, for reasons of convenience or out of fear of a formidable dislocation: one passed from the sun to the mists of the north, and knew nothing of the difficult language of the host country. There remained those who could not leave the “land of idolatry” because they were incapable of it: impecunious, ill, or lacking the networks necessary for the dangerous escape of persons and capital. Perhaps this is the case of the famous martyr Marco (Isaac) de Almeida Bernal. This young man, a native of Galicia, was arrested by the Holy Office in 1650 and cast into its dungeons. From his first interrogation he declared himself a Jew, and that, despite his love of life, he would die with joy to sanctify the name of God. In 1655, after five years of sufferings, he was condemned to be handed over to the secular arm. Before setting fire to the stake, he was asked whether he repented. He called his executioners idolaters and affirmed that he would never renounce his God and the Law of Moses. Once the fire was lit, and as the flames rose, a voice was heard chanting psalms.

All those who had the good fortune to reach Amsterdam were obliged to be true Jews — an obligation imposed by the city magistrate, before whom the authority of the mahamad¹⁵ was answerable.

There was then witnessed in Holland a sort of inversion of the statutes of purity of blood, and very quickly arose the problem of the Christian taint contracted by the new Christians who had remained in the Iberian peninsula. Crypto-Jewish fidelity in Spain became for some a tragic religious laceration. The souls of the new Christians, which had been torn between a fidelity to Judaism and an apparent devotion to Catholicism, attempted to do penance in fear and trembling, in dread and remorse, as this moving text of Joseph Salom de Gallego shows:

“Here I am, Lord, in Your presence, conscious of the punishment I deserve, repentant and trembling. My hair stands on end upon my head, my face is to the ground and my eyes are filled with tears. My lips tremble with terror and my soul is full of anguish. My blood freezes, my bile flows and my entrails are torn… And I alone am responsible for all my ills, for not having known how to rein in my passions, for having walked continually in darkness and having let myself be dominated by my desires.”¹⁶

Among the most feared censors, none was as violent as Abraham Pereyra, a tax collector in Spain, who passed over to Amsterdam taking with him the king’s revenue, and who came to understand the dreadful price to be paid for his past “infidelity” as a new Christian in the Iberian peninsula. Having become one of the richest and most powerful leaders of the community in Amsterdam, he stigmatized the new Christians who had remained in the land of idolatry. In this author, not the slightest compassion for those who do not have at their disposal the means necessary for the fidelity advocated by Maimonides. He arrogated to himself the right to condemn all those who remained in the peninsula and lived in the condition of men torn between a borrowed religion and the ancestral faith. Those who imagined they were not sinning by keeping the love of the God of Israel buried in the secret of their hearts were gravely mistaken. Dissimulation excused nothing, for it had its origin in the enjoyment of honors, of a social standing to which one was strongly attached. But this guilty obstinacy in duplicity, God will not pardon, for one had sacrificed His service on the altar of riches and of the goods of this world — all things that death or the Inquisition would see to making disappear. Sinners blinded by worldly appetites, the crypto-Jews deprived themselves of the greatest felicity there is: the observance of the divine precepts in their totality, of which one can in no case economize. A parodic Judaism, that of believing in the God of Israel and not having in one’s flesh the sign of the divine covenant: circumcision. But there is more. According to him, the fathers were accountable for the sins their sons committed, for not having taught them in the true faith. The latter, born in the land of idolatry, adults and fully conscious, would be no less sinners if they followed the example of their progenitors.

But not all the crypto-Jews persevered in this sin, and some reached Amsterdam. This uprooting, however, did not in itself find grace in Pereyra’s eyes. According to this intransigent censor, one had still to leave the land of idolatry in a certain spirit, not to join the Jerusalem of the North vi coactus [under compulsion]. Pereyra distinguished two types of crypto-Jews: the one who had taken the resolution to recover the faith of his ancestors thanks to the decision to put an end to his sinful existence and to redeem himself, and the one whom circumstances — the Inquisition, in this instance — pushed to tear himself away from the dilection of the Holy Office.¹⁷

Thus the small migratory flow is in no way homogeneous in its motivations. And this heterogeneity has a capital consequence: Amsterdam becomes at once the site of fidelity and of infidelity¹⁸ for the new arrivals.

Among the latter, some came nourished on a philosophical culture acquired in the Spanish universities, and discover that Judaism is a demanding religion, with imperatives they had not suspected, deprived as they had been for a century and a half of all rabbinical teaching. If every Jew had to submit — whatever his age — to the circumcision of the flesh, the circumcision of the heart did not always follow, and disappointments grew in proportion to the orthodox demands of the community’s religious core.

If it was necessary to belong to this community in order to do business and to remain in good standing with the authorities, many new Jews could mask, with regard to their recovered faith, a real silent indifference, or a displayed rebellion.¹⁹ We owe to a distant cousin of Spinoza, Uriel da Costa, the first scandal that shook the community.

Born in Portugal around 1583, Gabriel da Costa was the son of an old Christian and of a crypto-Jewish woman. It was probably she who instilled doubt in her son, who had passed through the Jesuit university of Coimbra and was, on that account, a good connoisseur of Thomist philosophy. “But not every Christian who doubts becomes a Jew”; this is what Gabriel — become Uriel — was to discover when he arrived in Amsterdam. His first disappointment was to discover that Judaism was not a biblicism. He made it his “quixotic” duty to prove to the community what the true religion of Moses was. This is not the place to narrate his sad adventure, punctuated by the humiliations and persecutions of the rabbis and ending with his suicide.²⁰ It is rather fitting to recall the violence with which da Costa denounced traditional Judaism and its adherents, and proclaimed his total rupture with religion. More than an infidelity, we are in the presence of a passional charge.

For Uriel, Christianity as much as Judaism are but scarecrows to keep men in the terror of sin. His renunciation of Judaism passes through three phases described by Révah: rejection of rabbinical practices, rejection of the traditional interpretation, and finally rejection of the Old Testament: “To combat Judaism, da Costa relies on the seven Noachide precepts which alone, according to Jewish theology, are valid for all the nations.”²¹ If he is unfaithful to Judaism, Uriel is unconditionally faithful to natural law. “It is natural law that binds all human beings by love… it is natural law that teaches the honest life, that discerns the just from the unjust, the ugly from the beautiful. The best of the Law of Moses, or of any other law, is contained exactly within natural law.”²²

This passional dimension, centered on the rejection of all religion, will be transformed into a philosophical infidelity under the pen of Spinoza — an infidelity that one may qualify as a dangerous renunciation, for it presents itself as a rigorous historical analysis, even though the philosopher takes broad liberties with history to bolster the rancor he exudes in the Theological-Political Treatise.

If Uriel da Costa rejected Judaism so violently, one may suppose that, born a Christian in Portugal, his dream of a biblical Judaism collided with an orthodoxy he had never known. It is nothing of the sort for Spinoza, who was born in Amsterdam; his father was parnas²³ and gave him an excellent Jewish education. As Révah informs us, until 5 December 1655, Baruch de Spinoza was not considered a heretic, since he was inscribed in the community’s book of offerings for a gift of 6 florins. Around this same date, Dr. Juan de Prado, an Andalusian new Christian born in 1614, received — after good studies at the university of Alcalá — the diploma of Doctor of Medicine from the university of Toledo. Still according to Révah, Prado, previously converted to deism by a crypto-Jew from northern Europe, was raising in the yeshiva²⁴ he nonetheless attended difficulties in the name of philosophical principles.²⁵

The deism of the orthodox Sephardim was in fact one of the figures of seventeenth-century European deism; it manifested itself in the following affirmations: autonomy of speculative and moral reason; rejection of all the admitted forms of divine revelation; the conception of a nature whose laws were fixed by God, at the creation, in an immutable manner; the conception of a law of nature, more moral than religious in essence, common to all men since the origins of humanity.²⁶ Such are the first rational elements of the Spinozist infidelity, an infidelity one would understand, so true is it that they are at the origin of one of the greatest philosophical systems of Western thought. The Ethics,²⁷ with its mathematical demonstrations, constitutes a respectable but radical infidelity toward Judaism, since the philosopher denies the creation of the world and refuses man the liberty without which the Torah has no meaning. For there is nothing contingent in the nature of beings. All things are determined by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and to act in a given manner.²⁸ There is in the soul no free will; the soul is determined to will this or that by a cause that is itself determined by another, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity.²⁹ Let us repeat: this philosophical infidelity is respectable. But alas Spinoza writes the Theological-Political Treatise,³⁰ in which the appearance of rigor cannot conceal the aversion he nourishes not only toward Judaism but also toward his former coreligionists. Some advance the hypothesis that numerous passages of this text belong to the Apología written immediately after his banishment (herem) from the community. Be that as it may, the Theological-Political Treatise constitutes the first anti-Jewish work divested of any tie to the religious, a secular breviary of hatred all the more formidable in that it claims to be devoid of all passion. The Theological-Political Treatise bears witness to a rancor and a resentment that never manifest themselves as such. They are used, “rationalized” in such a way as to meet the anti-Jewish prejudices of its readers.

What is a Jew for Spinoza? Above all a narrow-minded being. The first occurrence of the word is linked to money. To be sure, it is not to stigmatize the cupidity of the Jews in the Christian manner, but to illustrate a primitive mode of reasoning: “Suppose some piece of business was pecuniarily advantageous to them — they say that God brought them money.” The Jews are beings whose understanding is limited by superstition, which allows them to conceive of the love of God only in a material light. The proof of the definitive immaturity of the Jews is found by Spinoza in Paul, one of the authorities to which he most often appeals in his work. As if it were not enough for them to be narrow-minded and grasping, the Jews are also wicked. As for the fact that the Pharisees largely preserved their ceremonies after the loss of their State, one must see in this a mark of hostility against the Christians rather than a will to please God.³¹ The wickedness of the Pharisees is equaled only by that of the ancient Hebrews, whose hatred of the stranger is well known. Does it not form part of the fervor of their belief? And Spinoza adduces Psalm 139, verses 21, 22: the Hebrews had not only permission to hate the stranger, but “the sacred duty to detest them ferociously.”³² The malignity of the Jews is likewise patent, according to Spinoza, when they claim their election. From the divine choice there follows a happiness all the greater for not being shared. The philosopher is no better than his former coreligionists, since he does not allow the Jews to benefit from the universal religion he offers to the Christians, a religion that declines strangely into seven moral precepts in which tzedakah — that is, justice and charity — holds a fundamental role. Teshuvah, repentance, is at the heart of the seventh precept, but alas, it is operative only if man truly knows Christ according to the spirit, and if that is the case, one may say that Christ is in him.³³

Finally, Spinoza appeals to a historical example that is, to say the least, astonishing, and that concerns him particularly, since it effaces every trace of his own Jewishness: the perfect assimilation of the crypto-Jews in Spain. Here is what Spinoza writes on the subject of those who heroically attempted to preserve their Judaism in the daily fear of a denunciation: “When a king of Spain compelled the Jews to embrace the religion of the State or to go into exile, a very great number became Roman Catholics, and having a share thenceforth in all the privileges of native-born Spaniards, deemed worthy of the same honors, they merged so completely with the Spaniards that, a short time after, nothing remained of them — not even the memory.”³⁴ By spiriting away, with a stroke of the pen, the practice of the statutes of purity of blood, Spinoza wishes to efface crypto-Judaism, to deny its existence, even though Iberian racism was obviously well known to him. He speaks of race, of honor — so many expressions that refer very expressly to the Spanish racist laws. We have here touched the depths of absolute infidelity, and, far worse, of the animadversion of a former Jew.

At the hour of reckoning, one must think first of the crypto-Jews who remained in Spain. At the end of the seventeenth century, the problem no longer arose, and it seems that the Inquisition had succeeded in discouraging and flushing out most of the crypto-Jews. One must recall, however, that the statutes of purity of blood were not officially abolished until 1869.

As for Amsterdam, in spite of the famous infidels or of the creeping infidelity, we are still filled with admiration before the renaissance of Judaism in that city. If the Jewish community of Amsterdam does not constitute a model, it represents a unique example in history. The adventure of the “Nation” on the banks of the Amstel is an irreplaceable testimony to the fidelity of the crypto-Jews, to their victory over a Spanish Catholicism that had done everything to make them disappear. It is to their fidelity to the ancestral religion that we owe the dazzling success of the new Jews, who made of their community the showcase of world Judaism in the seventeenth century. The splendor of the great synagogue of Amsterdam, which one can still admire, bears witness to this “miracle.” In 1675, its sumptuous inauguration in great pomp, honored by the city authorities, refutes the Spinozist explanation according to which only the hatred of the nations allows the Jews to continue to exist.

Notes